Essential Photography Website Tips | The Power Of A Great First Impression – Does Your Photography Website Help Or Hurt?

Essential Photography Website Tips | How you lay out your photography website, how fast it loads, and even how many pictures you feature in your portfolio can make or break your first impression and be the critical difference between a loyal client for life and a lost sale. Don’t believe us? Think about how many times you abandoned the website as soon as it finished loading because it was downright ugly? Or gave up before even seeing the homepage because it took forever to load? It happens more often than you think, and you’ll want to make sure your website is not one of the abandoned ones!

Here’s the catch with photography websites: you’re a part of an incredibly creative industry, and your website needs to live up to the industry standards and showcase that creativity, while at the same time ensuring seamless performance, outstanding usability and providing the potential clients with all the relevant information they need to hire you. As you can see, setting up a photography website is a lot more than simply uploading a bunch of images to a free blogging platform and calling it a day. The good news is that it can be done! Here’s how.

Having a website that stands out from the sea of other photography websites is vitally important, but that doesn’t mean you can go absolutely crazy with the design. This is a photography website, after all, any it’s your work that needs to take the center stage, and not a flashy design. If your visitors can’t stop talking about how brilliant the design of your website is, barely mentioning your work, you have a serious problem on your hands! To get the most out of your website, keep things simple and make sure your work is the star of the show.

Simplify Navigation. And Then Simplify It Some More! | Essential Photography Website Tips

There are a few places on your website where you will not want to get too creative – and the navigation is one of them! People are used to certain things when it comes to website usability, such as a simple navigation bar at the top of each page with links to the most important pages, so give them just that! You can tuck away less important links in the secondary navigation in the sidebar, or even the footer. Simplifying the navigation isn’t just important for the visual appeal – it will also enable your visitors to focus on your work instead of trying to figure out how to get from one page to another!

White Space Is Your Best Friend | Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

Minimalist approach preaches using plenty of white space, and it’s for good reason. While you might be tempted to throw as much information at your visitor as possible, all at once, you don’t want to overwhelm them. Your website is your digital portfolio, and there are tactics that you should use to help present your work more efficiently. All advanced tricks aside, one of the most effective ones is definitely using white space to break up large paragraphs of text into more digestible chunks. Remember, the more important an element is, the more white space you’ll want to include around it to make it stand out, which is especially important for your work.

Leave Out Contact Details At Your Own Risk | Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

A photography website has two goals, and you need to make sure yours achieves both to get the most out of it: First, it needs to showcase the best examples of your work, and just as importantly, it needs to provide your potential clients with all the contact details they need to reach you the moment they’re ready to book a session. Don’t bury vital contact details several clicks deep – instead, feature them on each page, whether in the header or the footer.

The most important details are definitely your phone number and your email address, but you’ll also want to include your social media links if you use those accounts to promote your services, and not just post funny cat videos. However, you should also consider setting up a separate contact page with all the other contact details as well, and a contact form that will help your visitors contact you without leaving your website to open their mail app and type out the message.

Keep The Contrast High | Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

Most of the photographers we design websites for agree that majority of images look better on a dark, preferably black background. Light backgrounds simply don’t bring out the contrast in the pictures and often fail to emphasize all the colors, which is why you’ll want to make sure you use a dark background for your portfolio. If you decide to include a blog on your website, however, it’s a completely different story. The human eye finds it difficult to read long paragraphs of white text on a black background, so you’ll need to find a way to display text using black fonts on a white background to ensure easy readability.

It’s Easier Than You Think | Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself

In order to to set up a website that appeals to your potential clients, you need to start thinking like them. Luckily for you, we all visit hundreds of websites each week, and you already have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t, so let your own preferences lead the way! Keep in mind, though, that your ultimate goal is a website that’s easy on the eye, features interesting content, all the vital information and is simple to use. Nail these steps and you’ll be one step closer to success.

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I had been following Media Novak’s work for a while now and was always impressed with their logo work. The logo designs they came up with based on my wishes for what I wanted it to look like were above and beyond what I had imagined. The process itself was smooth and so easy. I gave input and they took it on board and applied it to the next design. I would highly recommend them any day!

Chantal Lachance-Gibson Photography

I cannot begin to say enough about Mark & the team at Media Novak. Their customer service has been TOP NOTCH! They have gone way beyond my expectations and dreams and have put together a website for me that I am so proud of… I actually can’t believe that it’s mine! If you are looking for a new website or new branding then look no further… contact these guys today!

Myrick Cowart – Photographer

Thank you thank you thank you! I really appreciate all of your help and your quick replies and editing, and well, everything. I will DEFINITELY be referring your team! I love my new logo and I love that it is completely my own and completely encompasses my brand. I really appreciate all of the time and effort your team has put into this project. Thank you again and again!

Bethany Petersen – Photographer

I decided to hire Media Novak after seeing a friends logo that I really liked. I sent them my ideas but I actually preferred one of their original concepts over my own ideas! They really understood the look and feel I was trying to achieve and I am delighted with my new logo! I found the process to be really enjoyable and smooth and emails were answered very quickly… a big thumbs up from me!

Karen McGowran – Photographer

Media Novak were helpful and listened to me as the client… never once tried to push their likes onto me… but they do offer good advice. I think what has mattered most to me was once we went live, they were very much still around to iron out little problems that only became noticeable to myself with the daily running of a website and a blog! I would highly recommend them to other businesses!

Jo-Ann Stokes – Photographer

Media Novak designed a beautiful website for me and I’m very satisfied with it. They listened to what I wanted and tailored the site to fit me and I really appreciate that. Their prices are reasonable and the quality is fantastic. I would highly recommend this company.

About Us

MediaNovak is a creative design agency that specializes in web design, online marketing, graphic design and corporate identity solutions. We started our company with some basic ideals—offer our customers exceptional design, while delivering a positive customer experience.

These ideals have helped grow our business and drive customers to our door. A majority of our business comes simply from “word of mouth” referrals—one customer telling another of the experience that we offer here. We consider this the ultimate compliment.